Kent J. Wesley and the Wesleyans: Religion in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
134 Wesley and the Wesleyans
established at Kingswood, near Bristol, and she was, he
claimed, willing to agree with this. He insisted that she was
crucified to the world, desiring nothing but God, dead to the
desire of the flesh, to the desire of the eye, and the pride of
life.
In his efforts to defend the proposed marriage on religious
grounds, Wesley fell back (despite his protestations to the
contrary) on the hyperbole which came easily to him:
And as to the fruits of her labours, I never yet heard or read of any
woman so owned of God: so many have been convinced of sin by her
private conversation; and so many have received remission of sins in
her bands or classes or under her prayers. I particularly insist upon
this. If ever I have a wife, she ought to be the most useful woman in
the kingdom: not barely one, who probably may be so (I could not be
content to run such a hazard) but one that undeniably is so. Now, shew
me the woman in England, Wales or Ireland, who has already done so
much good as G. M.. I will say more. Shew me one in all the English
annals, whom God has employed in so high a degree? I might say in
all the History of the Church, from the death of our Lord to this day.
This is no hyperbole, but plain, demonstrable fact. And if it be, who
is so proper to be my wife?
52
This, for all the exaggeration, had its pathos, betraying the
desperation of a man arguing against the majority, and tr y-
ing at the same time to kee p his desires within the frame of
his religious assumptions. If he also talked in such terms –
though there is no way of knowing how far he did – he was
saying things which his sharpest critics would use to accuse
him of putting Grace Murray before God. He himself quoted
Jane Keith especially, a Scotswoman who hovered between
Wesleyanism and Presbyterianism, finally settling for the
latter. She had said: ‘1. That Mr W. was in love with G. M.
beyond all sense and reason; 2. That he had shown this in the
most public manner, and had avowed it to all the Society, and
Women in Wesleyanism 135
3. That all the Town was in uproar, and all the societies ready
to fly to pieces.’
53
Perhaps the movement itself had come close to hysteria
generated by success in the late 1740s, and too much talk
about ‘holiness’ had been taken too seriously, not least when
Charles Wesley, himself safely married, attacked his brother
for changing his mind about the religious appropriateness
of marriage for someone so committed and called by God
to reviving Christianity. The new Wesleyan institution was
certainly not working perfectly. Wesley himself had replied
to Charles that he had modified his theological position, that
‘St Paul [had] slowly and gradually awakened me out of my
Mystic Dream’,
54
and that he was satisfied that his marriage
was theologically permissible. Nevertheless, he was stung by
Jane Keith’s accusation of what he summed up as inordinate
affection for Grace Murray, and in the prose narrative, written
after Grace Murray and Bennet had married, rejected the idea
that he loved the woman more than God. Inordinate affection,
he said, led one away fromGod, whereashis feelings for Grace
Murray had actually increased his passion for evangelism. He
hadnever,he c laimed, felta minute’sjealousytowardsBennet,
nor a minute’s resentment towards those ‘who tore her from
me’, whereas inordinate affection would have produced such
feelings.
The absolute denial was characteristic of Wesley’s style.
Moreover, he went on, excessive love made one uneasy in the
absence of the loved one, ‘whereas I never was uneasy, nei-
ther in parting, nor after it; no more than if she had been a
common person’. He may have remembered here that after
his own marriage Charles Wesley had written to John to point
out how cheerfully he was able to leave his new wife to resume
itinerating. His final argument was simple: ‘if I had had more
regard for her I loved than for the work of God, I should
136 Wesley and the Wesleyans
now have gone on strait to Newcastle [and tried to keep Grace
Murray] and not back to Whitehaven. I knew this was giving
up all: but I knew God called: and therefore, on Frid.29, set
out.’
55
He went on to record ‘great heaviness’, relieved by
preaching and prayer. He even spoke of having ‘accepted the
just punishment of my manifold unfaithfulness and unfruit-
fulnesss, and therefore could not complain’.
56
He was trying
hard to argue that he was right in believing that Providence
had decided the issue, and that he himself was to blame in
what had happened, and was being punished. He seemed to
take the accusation of inordinate affection to himself. At this
stage he did not know whether Grace Murray’s marriage to
Bennet had taken place.
All these religious exercises did not quite convince him of
the righteousness of Providence. Just how close his religious
temperament was to that of Grace Murray, and how important
to early Wesleyanism was the primary religious impulse, then
became clear. He recorded that:
we [that is, the Society, but especially Perronet] then poured out our
hearts before God. And I was led, I know not how to ask, That if he
saw good, he would show me what would be the end of these things,
in dreams or visions of the night. I dreamed I saw a man bring out
G. M., who told her, she was condemned to die: and that all things
were now in readiness, for the execution of that sentence. She spoke
not one word, nor showed any reluctance, but walked up with him to
the place. The sentence was executed, without her stirring either hand
or foot. I looked at her, till I saw her face turn black. Then I could not
bear it, but went away. But I returned quickly, and desired she might
be cut down. She was then laid upon a bed. I sat by mourning over
her. She came to her self and began to speak, and I awaked.
57
In the prose narrative Wesley made no comment which
would enable readers to decide whether he thought God had
answered him in this dream, and still less in what way he had
Women in Wesleyanism 137
been answered. This does not mean that he did not interpret
the dream, or that he found no support in it, but the only clue
to his reaction is that he continued to feel that Providence was
in charge of his life. In fact, if one looks at what happened
from Grace Murr ay’s point of view, and ignores the religious
terminology into which Wesley slipped after what he still
saw as a disaster, the collapse of their relationship – which
he explained, or perhaps accepted, as virtually a change of
mind on the part of Providence – was probably caused by
Grace Murray’s own change of mind. When the struggle with
his rival, John Bennet, was coming to a crisis in September
1749, Wesley noted: ‘Yet I could not consent to her repeated
request, to marry immediately.’ He told her that before he
could marry her it would be necessary to mollify Bennet,
to procure Charles Wesley’s consent, and to inform all the
itinerants and their societies of his reasons for marrying. She
said that she would not be willing to wait for more than a year,
and he answered that perhaps less time would suffice.
58
Put in this detailed way, John Wesley’s proposals were far
from simple. Grace Murray knew that neither Bennet nor
Charles Wesley was likely to agree to the marriage, and she
also knew that many articulate Wesleyan women were jeal-
ous of her influence on Wesley. He had made a major error
of judgement in taking her with him to Ireland. Bennet was
willing to marry her immediately; Wesley was prepared to ne-
gotiate for a marriage which might not in the end take place.
She wanted and, in terms of the social context, needed to
marry; she was no longer young, and marriage would solve,
and did solve, her personal problems. Bennet, who figures
unflatteringly in Wesley’s narrative, was having a successful
career as a travelling preacher but wanted to settle down in
a single place with his own congregation. Always a stronger
character than Wesley supposed, Grace Murray made her own
138 Wesley and the Wesleyans
decision, not least because Charles Wesley behaved as she had
expected. No doubt she was prepared to be obedient to Bennet,
but Wesleyanism, by freeing her from the numbing grip of her
past, had changed the nature of that submission. Much more
than before, she was her own woman.
John Wesley’s heavily slanted narrative, intended to show
that Grace Murray loved him rather than Bennet, gives a
revealing account of the meeting of the Newcastle society in
the hands of Charles. John believed that Charles had told the
members that his brother had used his:
whole art and authority, to seduce another man’s wife ...all in the
house (unless one or two that were instant in prayer) were set on fire,
filled with anger and confusion and driven to their wits’ end. S[ister]
Proctor would leave the House immediately. John Whitford would
preach with Mr. W. no more. Mat. Errington dreamed the house itself
was all in flames (and most certainly it was). Another dreamer went a
step further, and saw Mr. W, in hell-fire. Jane Keith was peremptory
‘John W. is a child of the Devil’; coming near J. B[ennet] himself; whose
repeated word was, ‘If John W. is not damned, there is no God’.
59
ThiswaswhatotherpeopletoldJohnWesleyhadhappened,
not what he had heard himself. The speakers quoted often
used religious references to express their feelings, but the
report leaves the impression that their language was a sort of
sanctified swearing. In general meetings of the society like this
one, when the members acted as a cross between a court and
a town-meeting, women were as free to give their opinions as
men. This kindof local freedom apart, ‘primitive Christianity’
altered little in the patriarchal system which characterized
Western churches.
If Wesley was aware that Wesleyanism had helped change
women’s perception of themselves, in line with what had been
happening in the seventeenth century, he gave no sign of it.
The Connexional structure as Wesley bequeathed it to the
Women in Wesleyanism 139
itinerants, through his formal creation of the Legal Hundred
(a lawyer’s concept which defined what Wesleyanism was in
the eyes of the state), left no place for women in the direction
of the movement at the national level. Women supplied an
audience and offered hospitality; locally they might become
spiritualcounsellors,primarilyforotherwomen.There wasno
question of Wesleyan women having ‘concerns’, in the formal
sense that Quaker women could claim that the Spirit had given
them a specific mission or ‘concern’, which they were obliged
to discharge, and which male Friends hesitated to question.
Elizabeth Fry was more prominent than any Wesleyan woman
in the early nineteenth century.
There was no apparent ‘feminisation’ of religion in
late eighteenth-century Wesleyanism, because after Wesley’s
death in 1791 the male itinerants, buoyed up by the rapid ex-
pansion of the societies in the 1780s, and by Wesleyanism’s
independent success in what was now the United States, did
not feel excessively dependent on the support of women. As
the societies consolidated into a new variant of the chapel sub-
culture which had been emerging in Dissent since the 1660s,
women were allowed merely to extend their domestic role into
that of a vast providing agency, which not only made tea and
fed innumerable meetings, but raised large sums of money for
the Connexion.
5
Anglican responses
The surprise with which so many Anglicans reacted to the
emergence of a perfectionist group which claimed to be
Anglicanbecomes moreexplicablewhenset againstthe chang-
ing cultural background of the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) offers a
naturalstarting-point,because heshocked hiscontemporaries,
not by passionate religious aspir ation, but by his thorough
rejection of religious dogmatism, and his belief that the human
mind worked best in sceptical isolation. Hobbes was too cau-
tious to rule out the possibility of a written revelation, but he
restricted the claims of theology that truth had already been
divinely revealed. No supernatural intervention illuminated
the minds of men and women to bestow wisdom from above:
a stable, ordered society had to be maintained by absolute
power. At his most sarcastic, Hobbes argued, in a discussion
of ‘separated essences’:
theologians say that Faith, and Wisdom, and other Virtues are some-
times powred [sic] into a man, sometimes blowninto him from Heaven;
as if the Virtuous and their virtues could be asunder; and a great num-
ber of other things that serve to lessen the dependence of Subjects on
the Sovereign Power of their Country. For who will endeavour to obey
the laws, if he expect Obedience to be Powred or Blown into him?
1
Hobbes crisply summarised how he thought the Protestant
tradition viewed salvation. Christ ‘did make that Sacrifice and
140
Anglican responses 141
Oblation of himself, at his first coming, which God was
pleased to require, for the Salvation at his Second Coming,
of such as in the meantime should repent, and believe on
him’.
2
‘Scripture’, he held, ‘was written to shew unto men the
Kingdome of God, and to prepare their minds to be his obe-
dient subjects, leaving the world and the philosophy thereof
to the disputation of men, for the exercizing of their natural
reason’. This section ended drily: ‘so that I see nothing at all
in the Scripture that requireth a belief, that Demoniacs were
any other thing but Mad-Men’.
3
The idea of holiness had little weight with Hobbes. He
rejected the assertion that ‘faith and sanctity are not to be at-
tained by study and reason, but by supernatural inspiration’.
4
Faith and sanctity were indeed not very frequent, he com-
mented, but ‘they are not miracles, but brought to pass by
education, discipline, correction and other natural ways by
which God worketh them in his elect, as he thinketh fit’. Faith
and obedience were both needed for salvation, but Hobbes
argued that even in a ‘Christian commonwealth we might be
said to be justified when we plead our will, our endeavour to
fulfil the law, and repent us of our failings,and God accepteth it
for the performance itself ’.
5
Professional theologians disliked
this commonsense view of man-God relations.
Hobbes is relevant not because he had no predecessors – he
presented a more brutal version of Montaigne – but because
he showed that a humanised pattern of social behaviour might
grow from the ruins left by the Civil War and a half-hearted
Restoration. Moderate Anglicans in the following century
might be horrified by what they considered Hobbes’s athe-
ism, but they sympathised with his psychological reading of
salvation, whereas the Wesleyans fully believed that some-
times faith and wisdom could be blown into a man or woman
from heaven. As for John Wesley himself, the scriptural text
142 Wesley and the Wesleyans
disarmed his mind, leavinghim helpless in the presence of men
and women convinced that both the Holy Spirit and evil spirits
could overpower the human mind. Wesley was not stupid, but
he was steeped in an inadequate tradition and found it hard
to criticise what people told him and what they seemed to do
and suffer.
6
These conflicts influenced what has been called the Latitu-
dinarian moral theology, against whose Walpolian form both
Whitefield and the Wesleys reacted. An old cultural struggle
simmered between an Augustinian-style despair of human
nature, and a moderate Anglican, modernising faith which
looked back to Erasmus and the Cambridge Platonists. In
general, the Latitudinarians held that human beings could and
shouldcooperatewithGod’sgracebecausethey retained some
traces of the image of God in which they had been created: in
theological terms, they did not suffer from total de pravity. A
modern defender of the Latitudinarians has conceded that:
the‘Restoration divines preached that doing goodis a fundamentalpart
of Christianity, that goodness is part of the great design of Christianity,
andthis was bound to mean the exaltation of charity,diligence,duties to
self and neighbour, social virtues and public piety ...but to conclude,
as some have, that the Restoration churchmen were peddling a merely
utilitarian system of ethics, and promoting it through an appeal to self-
interest and prudence, is a bizarre and highly selective interpretation
of their views.’
7
Latitudinarians believed that God would save those who of-
fered ‘a faithful though imperfect obedience, an obedience
suitable to man’s natural infirmity and frailty, and propor-
tionable to the assistance afforded to him’.
8
This leads us, in a gentler, less purely Anglican vein to the
further modernising ethical shift associated with the Earl of
Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746),
a shift which concentrated on feeling, rather than on reason or
Anglican responses 143
intuition, as the source of morality. Just as one could improve
one’s taste in architecture, painting and sculpture on a Gr and
Tour, one could cultivate one’s moral sense by trusting the
guidance of an inner prompting on how to respond to expe-
rience. This ability to refine one ’s moral perceptions might
operate in a theistic context, but not necessarily in a Christian
context. The American scholar Norman Fiering argues that
what Hutcheson was doing was secularising the Catholic and
Protestant theories which had been generated by religious ex-
perience in the seventeenth century, and which had been em-
ployed by spiritual directors and pastors to mould and control
through their own religious vocabulary what happened in the
personalities of those who came to them for advice. He said:
Hutcheson’s complex and discriminating sensations of shame, honour,
virtue, vice, and compassion and beauty were secularised versions of
the intuitive and essentially nonintellectual taste and relish, illumina-
tion and heart, holy affections and gracious dispositions of the saints.
The difference was, of course, that Hutcheson did not regard super-
natural intercession as the precondition of these.
9
Hutcheson and Shaftesbury did not substitute one moral lan-
guage for another – they had no intention of secularising
the kinds of moral behaviour which the religious casuists ex-
tolled. They pointed to the sense of pleasure and balanced
self-satisfaction which accompanied the knowledge that one
had behaved in a moral manner. Enlightenment implied a
clearing of the mind about the possibilities of human person-
ality and human activity. Christian views of human nature
were increasingly seen as a repulsive denial of the self and of
the enlightened man’s or woman’s capacity to transform city
and country, agriculture and industry, thought and letters.
Both George Whitefield and the Wesley brothers took a
view of people’s conduct to which not only the more sceptical,